


Are You My Mother?

by badboy_fangirl



Category: Prison Break
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-16
Updated: 2017-04-16
Packaged: 2018-10-19 12:37:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,448
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10639986
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/badboy_fangirl/pseuds/badboy_fangirl
Summary: The title of mother: is it a right or a privilege?





	

**Author's Note:**

> Title stolen from Dr. Seuss.

“Hi, Mom.”

Christina turned her head toward the sound of Lincoln's voice. They were keeping her sedated—it helped with the believability for the children—and she felt as sluggish as she knew she appeared.

He was a handsome boy, she thought suddenly. She'd never found him particularly attractive, not when she looked at him next to her own perfect little boy. Michael had big eyes that held every emotion he felt and one could always tell how much he loved his mother as he gazed at her. With Lincoln, it was harder to tell. Christina thought he loved her; he certainly had the dogged devotion of a Labrador, and he had shown it every day since Aldo left.

In this moment, she feels a rush of pity for the tall boy who looked older than he actually was. His life was about to go in the crapper, and she couldn't summon much energy to care—she’d like to think that was the morphine in her system, but she knew even at her most clear-headed she wouldn't change what was about to happen. She'd done this mother gig long enough, and Aldo taking off and leaving her to tend to the child she'd never wanted as well as one whose mental capacities made him exhausting to care for had only served to infuriate her. They would have a show down, some day. Some day she would repay him for his coldness to her and their son.

She'd always had an inkling that Aldo loved Lincoln more, even though there was no biology there to back it up. It had made her suspicious. Perhaps Lincoln belonged to Aldo in some other way that he had never revealed, and she sure as hell wasn't going to raise his bastard child when he couldn't see fit to stick around and help them all out.

The Company called to her too. He wasn't the only one who wanted a more exciting life than a house in the suburbs and PTA meetings and soccer matches.

But she did worry about Michael, certainly. He was gifted, sensitive, and of course, younger. It would be harder for him to be without his mother. Like any stray, Lincoln would find a way to survive, and she found it lethargically ironic that she was placing her child into his hands. Of course, social services would no doubt intervene, and the likelihood of the boys being separated seemed imminent. She would come back for Michael some day, when he was ready to take his place at her side.

A rough life would prime him for revenge and he would help her take The Company to new levels. Things other men were too shortsighted to envision. But not her son, her son would see it all, just as she did. Together, they would not only change the world, but also own it, in its entirety.

She stretched out a hand to the boy the nurses called, "Your older son," and he put his warm, solid palm into hers.

"Hello, dear," she said softly.

"You look better today, Mom," Lincoln said, which was his opening line every day. See, he wasn't particularly inventive.

"Thank you, sweetheart," she replied. "Where's Michael?" she asked.

Lincoln’s fingers clenched around her hand as he said, "I sent him to get a soda from the vending machine. Something to look forward to, you know. It makes the hospital not such an awful place to come to if you get a treat."

Christina had a moment of clarity then, despite the heroine derivative in her bloodstream. Lincoln loved Michael. He was also stubborn and ornery, and she almost grasped the thought before it drifted away. Their bond could be a problem.

But like things that float in and out and never settle, she wouldn’t fully understand that glimpse of insight for 25 years.

*

“Hi, Mom,” Lincoln says, his monotone holding a slight inflection that Michael would have found funny under other circumstances. If only they were slightly naughty boys doing something they would inevitably be caught and punished for. Of course, the truth was Scofield couldn’t remember when last he wasn’t suffering under punishment. Every moment from the day he entered Fox River Penitentiary had been one form of castigation or another.

The worst of it had been delivered today, from his own mother’s lips. Lincoln is not his brother. Lincoln is adopted. Lincoln is just somebody else’s kid that Aldo had brought home and thrust upon her.

Not that any of that matters. Michael had had only one constant in his life from the moment he was born, and that is the man standing just to his left as he jerks the small case from Christina’s henchmen’s fingers. 

Lincoln Burrows is the only one who never left.

Michael doesn’t need to see a therapist to accept the ramifications of this precedent. Lincoln has been his brother, his father and mother, his teacher, his provider, his punching bag, his shame.

Lincoln has been to hell and back, and yet he still screams for Michael to run, to get away.

Michael had listened to Aldo, on that one and only day he’d properly spent with his father as an adult, as he explained that what he’d done had been for their protection. He appreciates that Christina has not tried to show a noble approach in all of it. He doesn’t know if anything she has said is true, but he knows he’d never have believed the sob story about how she’d loved him so and it had killed her to leave.

Thinking of it now, as he and Alex run down an alley, he bets she used that one on Linc, though. Linc would have been more susceptible to the emotional overtone, only because he would have wanted to believe their mother had loved them. Loved  _him_. Maybe Christina was right, and he had tried to compensate Lincoln for her inadequacies.

Not that it matters a moment later as he hears a gunshot ricochet off of Lincoln’s yelp of pain. Nothing he has done could save his brother from this punishment, which was nothing more than being caught in a war that had nothing to do with him. 

He’d seen his brother kill too many people in the last few weeks; he had the ability to fire a gun now without flinching, because it was either kill or be killed.

_It was either kill or be killed_. Michael looks over at Alex; he thinks of holding his mother’s head underwater until her body stopped thrashing. He’d missed the opportunity again and again to really save his brother. What he has to accomplish in the next five hours would be more than a 150 hours of sitting for a full body tattoo, more than letting Abruzzi take his toes, more than asking unthinkable favors from the only woman he’d ever loved.

He has to accomplish his final task with no time to plan and unbeatable odds. 

For Lincoln, he can.

*

Lincoln stares into his mother’s eyes as she pulls the trigger. The world slows in that moment before impact, a place where he hears the crack of the bullet leaving the barrel and the desperate cry of his brother’s voice from a cell phone, and he receives a revelation.

This woman never loved him; she’d never loved either of them. She is not who they thought they’d known, or dreamed of, or at later dates full-on fantasized about. She wasn’t the person Michael had spoken of when he’d lamented that she didn’t raise them to be this. This is exactly what she’d raised them to be. At her mercy.

She had never been anyone’s mother, though; she never laid her life down on the kitchen floor like Lisa or went into the oblivion of Montana like Veronica. She never stood under the lashings of Gretchen’s satisfied smirk like Sara, nor lost her child to pointless violence like Mahone’s wife.

She’d been a bitch in heat, if she’d been anything.

When the pain erupts in his belly, he tries to hold back in the involuntary sound that expresses it. As he closes his eyes and wonders if Michael can save him one last time, he only wants to live so he can tell his brother the truth. They’d never had a mother, only each other.

He loses track of time, his thoughts wander—a cascade of memories that blend Michael and LJ and him together the way they should be. On a beach, beers in hand, laughing and rough-housing. He thinks, in the end, maybe Michael somehow knows, and he doesn’t have to tell him about Christina. It’s enough.

 


End file.
